Ten Toys That You Won’t Mind Buying
If you’ve ever had to shop for kids toys, you know it can be a demoralizing experience. Rows and rows of schlock, organized in alternating rows of “pink” or “camo”, anchored to their boxes by 43 twist ties, reeking of child labor and waste. (Can you guess how much I like shopping?)
To help you out during this trying time (for the first-world definition of “trying time”), here are a few toy ideas. All of them have seen heavy use in our house (or have been coveted at friends’ houses) and are great for open-ended play. In addition, they’ve been just as popular with boys and girls, and have worked for a wide age bracket.
1. Wedgits
This is one of the most deceptive toys we own. I can’t even remember how we got it (present? random mall purchase?), but it starts off looking like a cube of stacking blocks. Looks boring, right? Well, it turns out it’s a deeply nested group of squares with compatible angles that let you build some crazy, crazy stuff. We have gotten sooooo much mileage out of this, given that it works about as well for 2 year olds as it does with drunk adults. Only possible issue is the little white pieces, which are small enough to be choking hazards. But, they also sell a “junior” edition where the white pieces are larger, at the expense of some versatility. For maximum fun, I’d splurge and get the 2 cube set.
2. Fridgits
A complicated marble run that attaches magnetically to the fridge. Only downside is that it fails to do one of the key jobs of toys, namely, keeping the kids out from under your feet while cooking.
3. Magna-Tiles
We don’t actually have these, but every time I run across them, I want them badly. Then I check the prices on-line and don’t buy them. But I still want them. Oh, and I’ve heard that kids enjoy them too.
I’ve waxed poetic about the awesomeness of Snap Circuits before. The original review still holds. Plus, they have a new edition which has fiber optics!
5. Play Dough
Who doesn’t like extruding?
6. Fractiles
This is less of a toy and more of an art project. Probably not the best gift for a fidgety kid, but a kid with a bit of focus can do a ton with this. Great for traveling as well.
7. Uno
If you have kids with a wide range in ages, get Uno. It’s about the only game where a 4 year old can play with a 12 year old and neither one gets bored.
8. Quirkle
Another game that works well for a broad range of ages. Simple rules, but not boring. Similar concept as Uno (i.e. grouping of likes), but in a tiled crossword format.
9. Set
One of the most engrossing card games out there. It looks like it should be easy, but it’s not — which means it’s a better option than your 200th round of “go fish”. Plus, it requires a kind of rapid pattern matching that kids are frequently better at, which means you don’t have to throw the match to make sure your kids win sometimes. Trust me — they’ll beat you fair and square.
10. Carcassone
This is a terrific first strategy game. Definitely skews a bit older than Quirkle (I’d say 3rd grade and up is ideal), but just as fun for adults.
Please leave any other good ideas in the comments!
Does This Trampoline Violate the Laws of Physics?
Late last week, I ran across a spectacular video of a man being completely awesome:
The video shows Christophe Hamel jumping/falling/hurtling off of walls, landing on a trampoline, and then bouncing up to land back on top of the wall — sometimes in a handstand in case there was a risk you wouldn’t be impressed enough otherwise [seen at 1:50+].
My first thought on seeing this video was “It’s gotta be really hard for his mom to watch this.”
My second thought was, “Is it really possible for a trampoline to conserve energy that well?”
Here’s the problem. In introductory physics, you learn that when something falls in a gravitational field, it turns gravitational potential energy into kinetic energy (i.e., falls down, goes faster). If that same something then bounces, it proceeds to do the reverse. To get back to exactly the same height, there cannot be any energy lost from the object — no energy lost to air resistance, or to internal motions in the object. However, in pretty much every aspect of our real world experience, we know that this perfect energy conservation doesn’t occur, leading to the following:
If you’re talking about a bouncing ball, and you lose some energy deforming the ball during the bounce, no harm, no foul. But, if you’ve just fallen 2 stories and are trying to bounce back up to the same height, then you’d better conserve every last possible bit of energy you possibly can.
I’ve spent more time than I care to admit watching this guy, trying to figure out if trampolines are really that efficient at changing a person’s direction without significant energy loss. I think that to first order, yeah, they must be. At first I thought that he might be extracting energy out of his muscles at the turnaround, but in most of the tricks, he’s pretty much dead dropping on his curled back, not pushing off with his legs. My second thought was that maybe he was extracting energy from his initial rotation, but in a number of the tricks he’s coming back with more rotation than he left with (although frequently in a tighter tuck, so it’s not clear what’s actually happening with his angular momentum — i.e., I’ve watched, but have not done math).
The one thing that has convinced me that he does not have an invisible jet pack is that he doesn’t really come back to exactly the same height. His feet do (eventually), but he usually starts the trick from a tall position, frequently with an arm stretched vertically, or with a jump to get some extra height. Then, when he comes back up, he’s frequently in a tuck or a dive, such that his center of mass is indeed lower than when he took off (though granted, not by much!). Here’s a couple of examples right from the beginning of the film, with the takeoff on the left and the return on the right:
And another showing an example of the extra vertical takeoff (a bit trickier to see in the stills because of the perspective, but it’s clear in the video that he’s jumped upwards):
I’m relieved that energy conservation is still with us, despite this man’s very fine attempts to do away with it.
A Moon With a View
This weekend the Seattle Times published a lovely interview with Bill Anders, one of the Apollo astronauts. The article is full of interesting little tidbits, but I was most taken with his description of taking photos while his capsule orbited the moon:
While he had been meticulously trained to photograph the moon, making pretty pictures of the Earth from space had not occurred to anyone at NASA. So Anders, with no light meter and really no idea where to start, improvised.
“I had to bracket (the exposure),” he says. “I’m just going click-click-click-click-click, just changing that f-stop up and back. I machine-gunned that mother.”
The resulting picture was one of the most famous from the Apollo program — the classic NASA “Earthshine” photo. Which, the article reveals, has actually been “printed backwards for more than 40 years because of a NASA mistake”.
There is also the always jaw dropping glimpse into the mindset of the first generation of astronauts:
“I figured there were three possibilities, about equally weighted,” Anders says with the sort of casual tone most people would use to describe a choice of sandwich meat. “One, we could go and have a successful mission — one-third chance — which is what happened. Or, we could go, survive and not have a successful mission — that’s Apollo 13. Or, we could go and we wouldn’t come back; splat somewhere.”
Anders’ assessment: “Pretty good odds.”
There are many more gems in the article, so definitely worth a read.
Eyes on Andromeda
The practice of astronomy is different than it used to be.
Back in the day, the image was of the lone astronomer, sitting at their telescope, communing with the universe. Over time, we got more use to the idea that maybe groups of astronomers might come together to work on a common project. But still, there were fairly tight connections between astronomers and their data.
Over the last decade and a half, something fundamental has changed. Data has gotten big. So big, that it’s impossible for any one person to make sense of it. More importantly, data of these sizes make it impossible to “notice” anything. The line of research that probably got me tenured was based on “noticing” something interesting in several dozen galaxies. But how do you “notice” something in hundreds of terabytes of data?
The standard answer these days is (naturally) computers. Computer science is great at problems like this, and many astronomers are working on the interface of CS these days. But that said, there are some problems that software is simply lousy at. So what do you do when your scientific interests run smack into a problem that you can’t code your way out of?
Which brings me to the Andromeda Project. For the past 2-3 years I’ve been running a ridiculously huge Hubble Space Telescope (HST) program to map out a big chunk of the Andromeda galaxy (see here for the project web site, here for a more friendly introduction, and here for more technical details than you’d ever want to know). The project is great — we’re measuring several dozen properties of more than 100 million stars (or, as I prefer to think of them, 0.1 billion stars), using light from the ultraviolet, optical, and near-infrared. But we’ve easily passed into the new world of Big Data.
There are countless projects we’re hoping to do with these data, and for those that deal with individual stars, we’re in great shape. But, we had one big problem. Stellar clusters.
Stellar clusters are groups of stars that formed from the same gas cloud, at the same time, with the same chemical composition. They are probably the dominant birthsites for young stars, and are incredibly important for understanding all sorts of things about the life cycles of stars. However, they are a remarkable pain to try to find with a computer. Believe me, we’ve tried. And tried. And tried some more. But in the end, nothing works as well as humans.
So what to do? Well, at first we had 8 PhD-level scientists spend months looking at a small fraction of the data. And while that worked, there was a lot of other important stuff that those 8 PhD-level scientists could have been doing instead.
Luckily, we found a solution, through collaborating with the Zooniverse crew. The idea behind the Zooniverse is that anyone can be a citizen scientist, with a little bit of training and the right kind of project. Finding stellar clusters was perfect for this approach — the data is gorgeous, the problem hard but not impossible, and the routine task is straightforward and actually rather fun. The Zooniversians worked closely with my team to make an unbelievable web site that makes searching for clusters simple for anyone.
At this point, we’ve been live for less than a week. In that short space of time, many thousands of people from all over the world have performed several hundred thousand searches for stellar clusters in our library of Hubble images. As a scientist, I’ve been blown away by people’s enthusiasm for the project, and the careful work they’ve done.
However, we’re nowhere near finished. If you have a little time on your lunch break, please click on through to http://www.andromedaproject.org and give us a hand!
Transition
This isn’t an easy post to write, but it’s time for me to leave Cosmic Variance and Discover and go back to blogging on my own. It’s a move I’ve been contemplating for a long time, essentially unrelated to the recent website update here. After having blogged for many years, I’ve decided that I’m happiest when I feel the least amount of responsibility, and the greatest freedom to be personal and idiosyncratic. Even though I’ve always had perfect freedom here, there was inevitably the (correct) feeling that our efforts represented a group, not just my personal quirks. If a month goes by and I don’t feel like blogging, I don’t want to feel that I’m letting anyone down other than myself.
So, I have a new blog at my personal site, which I’ll update as the spirit moves me. I’ve imported copies of all my previous blogging to there, so it doesn’t look completely empty right from the start. Add me to your RSS feeds if you like.
But don’t un-follow Cosmic Variance! The rest of the crew is dedicated to stepping up in my absence, so this will continue to be the go-to place for fun and eclectic blogging about physics and astronomy and whatever else.
I love these folks to death, and wish them all the best — I’ll even be leaving comments now and then. Enormous thanks to Julianne, Mark, John, JoAnne, Daniel, and Risa for sharing this space with me over the years. And thanks to Discover, and in particular Amos Zeeberg and Gemma Shusterman, for keeping the gears running smoothly for most of my tenure here. It’s been an honor and a pleasure.
Dave Brubeck
Dave Brubeck, an innovative and influential jazz pianist over many years, has died at the age of 91. Based in California, he was a leader of so-called West Coast Jazz, bringing a spirit of experimentation to a part of the jazz world that had been resolutely mainstream.
Brubeck loved to experiment with unusual time signatures, a tendency that culminated in his masterpiece album, Time Out. The tune played above, Blue Rondo à la Turk, is predominantly in 9/8 time, with the beats broken mostly into a 2+2+2+3 pattern. But things aren’t quite so simple, as Wikipedia explains.
The best thing about Brubeck’s experimentations was that they never sounded formal; they were highly musical and fun to listen to, seemingly flowing without effort unless you tried to really focus on what was going on. He was a much-beloved figure in jazz, and will be sorely missed.
Update: An anecdote from Russ Gershon on Facebook:
I heard him tell a story of when he was on the cover of Time in the late 50s. He was at a hotel with Duke Ellington (they were playing in the same jazz festival, maybe Newport). When Brubeck learned about the coverage he immediately went to Duke’s room and apologized that it was him and not Duke who first earned Time’s cover.
Watching the Wind
Ever since discovering Richard Long‘s work back in the 80′s, I’ve been incredibly drawn to land art of various forms. Most work of this type tends to be fairly static, but I recently ran across some pieces that I found mesmerizing, in their capturing and visualizing wind. (Strictly, these don’t meet the definition of “land art”, but heck, if you’re going to visualize wind, you probably need some help from technology).
Here is northern California artist Ned Kahn’s piece, covering the side of a science center in Switzerland with thousands of pieces of aluminum, whose orientations adjust in response to the wind. If I could find a way to have this video on infinite loop, I would…
(And, of course, having some problems embedding video with the new site…sigh. Here’s the link: Click here)
Colbert Redux
We are still in shakedown mode here at Discover Blogs, although hopefully things are mostly working well. One change is that from now on people will have to register to leave comments. Maybe that’s for the best? Let’s see how it goes, at any rate.
Last night I had the privilege of once again appearing on the Colbert Report to talk with our nation’s leading pundit about the frontiers of modern science. I can’t seem to embed the video (shakedown, remember?), but here’s the clip. I’m not sure you’d want to use it to help explain how the Higgs mechanism works, but I think we had fun. The joke about “massive” at the end makes sense only if you know that Colbert has a running gag, referenced earlier in the show, in which he has been trying to get people to say “massive” as a synonym for “cool.”
The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive
Freshening Up
You may have noticed that all the Discover blogs now have a new look. (One that is still being tweaked, so don’t expect to see my headshot up there for very long.) In fact the whole site has been updated, so there may have been some issues in page loading times and so on. All part of the shakedown process, and hopefully things should be back to normal soon.
Reviews!
Many writerly friends of mine swear with a straight face that they never look at reviews of their books. I have tried but failed to comprehend the inner workings of these alien minds; personally, as much as I know it might pain me, I can’t help but read reviews. Sometimes I might even learn something! Or at least be gratified, in this nice review of The Particle at the End of the Universe by Adam Frank at NPR.
Or, on the other hand, simply be amazed and astonished. The most amusing “review” so far has come from one of the good readers at Amazon, working under the nom de plume “Chosenbygrace Notworks,” and coming with the to-the-point title “Arrogant atheist `science’.” Apparently Chosenbygrace is not handicapped by actually having read the book, but did hear me talk on Coast to Coast AM. Here’s the opening:
Sean Carroll is a typical atheist physicist who arrogantly disregards creationists to the point where he does not even acknowledge they exist unless prompted (like happened on Coast to Coast AM tonight). The liberal media and filled with money sapping money-obsessed morons like this, willing to indebt any generation of Americans into becoming slaves. It’s already happened, and Americans in general are all debt slaves because of atheism-theoretical-physics cultists like this, and the idiot atheists who worship delusional morons like this.
It goes on, but, you know, probably the gist has been conveyed. The physics/atheism connection is a classic, of course, but I hadn’t been aware that we in the cult were also responsible for plunging Americans into debt. 5 out of 425 people found the review helpful, so at least someone is being helped! (In fairness, the Amazon review by Ashutosh Jogalekar probably does a better job of conveying what’s in the book than any I’ve yet seen.)
Other reviews are puzzling, and I have to mention one in particular. Read More
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